Isotropy-Optimized Contrastive Learning for Semantic Course Recommendation
This addresses semantic course recommendation for students, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of anisotropic BERT embeddings in course recommendation by proposing a contrastive learning framework with isotropy regularization, resulting in improved embedding separation and more accurate recommendations compared to vanilla BERT baselines.
This paper presents a semantic course recommendation system for students using a self-supervised contrastive learning approach built upon BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). Traditional BERT embeddings suffer from anisotropic representation spaces, where course descriptions exhibit high cosine similarities regardless of semantic relevance. To address this limitation, we propose a contrastive learning framework with data augmentation and isotropy regularization that produces more discriminative embeddings. Our system processes student text queries and recommends Top-N relevant courses from a curated dataset of over 500 engineering courses across multiple faculties. Experimental results demonstrate that our fine-tuned model achieves improved embedding separation and more accurate course recommendations compared to vanilla BERT baselines.